Workplace Learning in Physical Education

Emerging Teachers' Stories from the Staffroom and Beyond

Tony Rossi, lisahunter, Erin Christensen, Doune Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136479342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Pre-service and beginning teachers have to negotiate an unfamiliar and often challenging working environment, in both teaching spaces and staff spaces. Workplace Learning in Physical Education explores the workplace of teaching as a site of professional learning. Using stories and narratives from the experiences of pre-service and beginning teachers, the book takes a closer look at how professional knowledge is developed by investigating the notions of 'professional' and 'workplace learning' by drawing on data from a five year project. The book also critically examines the literature associated with, and the rhetoric that surrounds 'the practicum', 'fieldwork' 'school experience' and the 'induction year'.

The book is structured around five significant dimensions of workplace learning:

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• Social tasks of teaching and learning to teach

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• Performance, practice and praxis

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• Identity, subjectivities and the profession/al

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• Space and place for, and of, learning

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• Micropolitics

As well as identifying important implications for policy, practice and research methodology in physical education and teacher education, the book also shows how research can be a powerful medium for the communication of good practice. This is an important book for all students, pre-service and beginning teachers working in physical education, for academics researching teacher workspaces, and for anybody with an interest in the wider themes of teacher education, professional practice and professional learning in the workplace.

Part I

The study

1 Learning to be a teacher

Introduction

The basic mechanics of becoming a teacher may not have changed all that much over the past 40 years. As we discuss later, but for a few pockets (in the developed world at least), the experience of those wishing to be teachers approximately resembles a common structure. Generally it is made up of a period of formal university education; this might be a three-year baccalaureate degree in a particular area of study (in a disciplinary subject area like history or mathematics) followed by a programme of professional learning sometimes at the same university or sometimes at a different university but most commonly in a school or faculty of education. Alternatively it might be an integrated degree that includes the study of education that might run for four or five years. In among these configurations of structure are periods that are allocated to professional experience; that is, ‘work’ in schools to allow the life of schools to be experienced from the perspective of being a teacher. The allocation of time and how it is organized and governed (and indeed assessed) varies, but what can be said with some certainty is that learning to be a teacher always involves doing the work of a teacher. In some cases (though Furlong (2013) would argue that it is relatively few), learning to be a teacher after successfully completing a first degree consists almost entirely of doing the work of a teacher.

Potential changes to teacher education in Europe signalled by the Bologna Accord, an agreement among participating member states to standardize tertiary education to a point where university credits can be exchanged across international borders and the length of time in university programmes is the same, are yet to become clearer. However, the effect of the accord is being felt further afield; the University of Melbourne in Australia has adopted some of the Bologna Agreement structures in its professional preparation degrees. Readers will have already noted that this forms just the beginning of the learning process required to be a teacher and that being a teacher requires ‘learning’ to continue across the span of a career. One of the steepest learning curves is in the first year post-qualification or what our American colleagues refer to as the ‘rookie’ year. This transition year presents a number of challenges not least of which is the propensity for isolation, a plotline evident in the stories that follow later in this book. It was this notion of learning while working as a teacher (workplace learning) that intrigued us in the first instance, and then, based on some of the stories of our students (we will refer to them as pre-service teachers from here), in those workplaces, provoked the research agenda that forms the context for this book. This was where we came in.

The genesis of a research agenda

It is reasonable to suggest that teacher education, as it has always done, continues to attract attention regarding the need for revision and reform (Cochran-Smith and Fries, 2001; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Ferfolja, 2008; Smyth, 2006; Tinning, 2004; Zeichner, 2003). In Australia, for example, there are continuous calls for improved (new) teacher abilities in personal literacy levels, subject matter knowledge and pedagogical skill. Such accounts are prevalent in most Western developed countries and they tend to underline the sensitive and contested ideological terrain of teacher education that results in deeply divided opinions about it.

Similarly, arguments prevail around the significance of the practicum¹ in terms of impact on pre-service learning, its place in teacher education and the amount of time allocated to it within programmes. In addition, the role and indeed effectiveness of the initial year of teaching, as we suggest above referred to often as the induction or transition year, is also regarded as crucial in teacher development. We acknowledge that these issues are clearly of great national and even international importance, certainly in the developed world. However, the purpose of this book is not specifically to engage in polemic discourse about the place, role and function of these particular stages of teacher development. Admittedly the project (and therefore this book) came into existence against the policy backdrop of such contested discourse. The ebb and flow of such discourse given its inherent political nature, we are sure, will continue unabated. Rather, our interests across the nearly six-year life of this research project (comprised of a one-year pilot study, more than a year of development work, a three-year nationally funded research project, and the conclusion of a Ph.D.) were in delving more deeply into what is actually going on, and where, in terms of the school as the place of work-based learning for emerging teachers. In other words, we wanted to attempt to document the nature of the experience of final year Health and Physical Education² (HPE) pre-service teachers as they engaged in their final practicum and then transitioned into the profession and undertook the ‘induction’ year as beginning teachers. Readers, we are sure, will acknowledge that the arguments for more workplace time in schools for pre-service teacher learning (Colquhoun, 2005) are rife and imbued with (as we have observed) more than just a little partisan politics. We argue that such a discussion needs to be far more informed by the nature and quality of such professional learning rather than simply (and complacently in our view) assuming that more must surely be ‘better’, a position which attracts various levels of support around the world. We were far more interested in the school as a place of work for emerging teachers (we refer here to both pre-service teachers and beginning teachers) where we assumed that learning to become a member of a profession takes place.

Where do we learn?

It is argued that we live in a pedagogized society (see Bernstein, 1996; Singh, 2001). This means not so much that the world is full of teachers (even though we could think of the world this way – or at least view pedagogical work as ubiquitous); rather it means that the opportunities to learn are more widely distributed than ever before. However, at the same time there is a form of centralized control over what is learned, whether this is through an accredited (national) curriculum, the selected ‘science’ that allegedly endorses a product on a billboard or in a television advertisement, or electronically based information. This abundance of information and its relative ease of access affects not only children in school but also university and college students, trade apprentices and those in a range of professional preparation programmes (invariably but not exclusively in higher education) or in early career contexts. This may seem to have little resonance with the central plot of this book at this stage but consider this little example. We would argue that any keen exercisers out there, at the point of injury, use the Internet to self-diagnose. It may well be that this is purely a precursor to seeking professional help. Nonetheless, it is a practice that until a few years ago was mostly absent. In the days before electronic media and information availability, very few people self-diagnosed by going to the local library and borrowing or consulting a book on functional anatomy, much less sports medicine. The same may be said of building a cabinet, learning a language … the examples are almost endless. There is no suggestion here that this is either good or otherwise; rather it is an observation of the widespread, almost universal availability of information, (so-called) facts or knowledge, instructions, guidance, advice and so on. Moreover, it is an acknowledgement of the ubiquity of pedagogy … a pedagogized society if you will.

One might think that this digital revolution would have a profound effect on how people become educated and qualified in the professions that leads to accreditation and therefore being granted a ‘licence’ to practise. To some extent this is true and in some cases professional education has become (not always for educational or pedagogical reasons), an ‘online’ experience (see Metzler (2009) for the case of Western Governors University or WGU, accredited to deliver totally online teacher education programmes). Rizvi and Lingard (2010) talk about the globalization of knowledge but at the same time how the control of that knowledge has certain centralized features (for example, through large media companies or more increasingly Internet-based companies like Google). This leads, they argue, to a globalizing of policy-making, invariably informed by the neo-liberal imaginary (see Ball (2012) for more on this topic). An outcome of this is the almost excessive degree of what we will call ‘policy cloning’ in social, monetary and inevitably education (including higher education) policies.

How much change?

In some senses (and contexts), however, the opportunities for professional learning have not changed much. They may be enhanced with all sorts of online and digital opportunities and support mechanisms, but for the most part the structural constraints for learning in the professions are based on an industrial model. Thus, if we return to the ‘professionals-in-training’ referred to earlier, time in the workplace ‘practising’ craft is regarded as non-negotiable. Indeed, those who might choose to argue otherwise would be quickly labelled heretics or loonies, or some other epithet. Hence in medicine (in particular) – time on the wards is seen almost as a rite of passage or, better still, a baptism of fire (see Cooke et al., 2010). Similarly, in nursing, teaching, social work, etc. the practicum as we have suggested holds particular privilege.

We use the word ‘practicum’ (or descriptions of it) with caution. This is because increasingly around the world within the context of teacher preparation (sometimes referred to as Initial Teacher Education or ITE) or teacher education (some still use the term teacher training) which is the subject of our focus, time in the workplace is seen as the only or the best way to learn how to be a teacher. In other words, time in the workplace (regardless almost of the quality of that time – see some of our earlier work) is how learning to be a teacher is conducted. In the United Kingdom this is a hotly debated and hotly contested policy issue. We will talk more about this later; for now it is important to acknowledge this as an example of what we suggested earlier as the globalization of policy (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010) or, as we suggest, ‘policy cloning’. In other words, policy enactment in education in particular around the globe is predicated on the mores of the polity rather than on evidence. These mores are invariably informed by a neo-liberal, free market-inspired agenda that is monitored via managerial regulatory practices (Apple, 2004). It is an approach to education generally, and the preparation of teachers specifically, that ties education squarely to the economy. Educational policy then is the contested terrain upon which arguments about how best to educate teachers are played out and, within the context of these arguments, the role of work-based experience (and therefore potentially learning) is debated and it is clear that in some jurisdictions the cleaving of teacher education away from universities, to be placed in schools, is a stalking discourse.

Educational policy and learning to be a teacher: reform, reform and yet more reform

As we have indicated already, there is little doubt that teacher education around the world, for much of its recent history, has been mired in controversy. Primarily the controversy is ideological (see Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005) for an American account of this controversy). For the most part, teacher education seems to be regarded as a hotbed of radicalism that needs to be exorcised to enable more sensible programmes to be developed around the principles of technical skill, competence and subject matter knowledge. We are pretty convinced that it would be hard to find an argument against such principles. However, most researchers in teacher education would regard such principles as important but mostly insufficient for the preparation of teachers to meet the needs of twenty-first-century schoolchildren, especially since it seems almost impossible to predict the kind of world children will be a part of by the time they leave school. This is not how the situation might be perceived by various sections of the media. It will come as no great surprise to learn that a newspaper like the Daily Telegraph in the UK would lead its education editorial emphasizing subject matter knowledge and suggesting that teacher education students receive far too much ‘classroom theory’ (see Paton, 2011).

It may well be that the interlocking contestations around teacher education are examples of what Cuban (2008) calls tame problems. That is, they are relatively procedural and a large number of solutions may be brought to bear to address them, such as better training in classroom management, a more content-based curriculum, increased ‘practice’ in pedagogy and so on. In truth, education, including teacher education, is more likely to be a wicked problem. This is an intractable concern that has no end-point solution and one that can only be managed, often it would seem, in the developed world at least, within the context of the electoral cycle. Cuban prefers the term ‘dilemma’, in that the dilemma of education – and, we would argue, of teacher education also – can only be managed through difficult choices between alternatives. The overriding problem of course is that the available alternatives are more often than not politically aligned. It would seem that whoever can best mobilize the electorate gets to choose the alternative. Consider the latest example in Australia. Most readers will know that Australia has a democratically elected two-house parliamentary system. As with any democracy, Australian Federal governments change from time to time and this invariably means the appointment of an Education Minister with a reform agenda, especially if the party in power has changed (and sometimes even if it hasn’t). Inevitably, the ‘reform’ agenda is based on ‘righting’ the errors of the previous administration around curriculum making and curriculum design.³ Hence the Australian (National) Curriculum⁴ is a broad curriculum initiative in core school subject areas that aims to have all children across a nation of federated states study roughly the same thing – the idea will not be lost on readers from the UK who would know that their education system went through such a process in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The Australian Curriculum, then, several years in the making, informed by a wide-ranging evidence base, the subject of numerous working parties, submissions (in their thousands) and consultative meetings, becomes the subject of reform by virtue of a change in government. In a sense the political colour of the party in power is almost irrelevant – the message here is that the intense politicization of education continues unabated. Meanwhile, the universities and colleges mostly (though it should be said not exclusively) responsible for teacher education wait in the wings, second-guessing ministerial decisions anxious to bed down some policy related to teacher education. We are sure many readers will find this example very familiar. Health and Physical Education (the full name of the school subject area in Australia), far from being immune from this type of agenda, is generally caught up in such reform as a consequence of its contested subject matter.

Motivations for reform

Motivations for reform are invariably immersed in the language of failure (Mayer et al., 2008). Cochran-Smith and Fries (2005, p. 75), for example, show how the launch of Sputnik in 1957 (which put the former Soviet Union into space ahead of the Americans) sent the USA into a frenzy (they use the term ‘public hysteria’ from Lagemann, 2000) where the perceived failure of the nation’s schools to prepare future citizens for a technological world was matched only by the derision aimed at the nation’s teacher educators and the programmes they ran in universities. We are sure this will have an all-too-familiar ring to it. It was only a few years after Sputnik that Koerner (1963) declared that American teachers were being ‘mis-educated’. Today, the near hysteria, though largely media driven, points to the failure of teachers to prepare the children in their charge to compete in international comparative testing regimes as being the central problem in education. There are plenty of believers in Australia who similarly consider pre-service teachers in Australia to be mis-educated (see, e.g. Donnelly, 2004). Of course it is not only those in high office who have something to say about teacher education. Many pre-service teachers, for example, often assume that the most significant part of their course will be the practicum. As we found, for some the story is a little different once they have been in schools. However, we should not be at all surprised by this initial enthusiasm for the practicum. In appearance at least, it must seem like the opportunity to really try out this thing called teaching … the very reason for being in the course in the first place. When it becomes apparent that the experience may be constrained by convention, tradition and compliance needs, is unnecessarily stressful and for the most part artificial, the practicum poses a rather more significant philosophical challenge. For others however, this seems not to matter. The fact is that time in schools learning how to be a teacher is regarded as so obviously the place where the most important learning takes place that to argue otherwise would place one on the fringes of insanity.

However, as Phelan and Sumison (2008) suggest, ‘practice’ is generally regarded as a one-size-fits-all procedure governed by pedagogical rules and a set of generalizable principles. Theory, they claim, is eschewed because of its irrelevance to the job at hand. It seems not to matter what theory either, by the way; whether it is the musings of a dead American behaviourist or a dead French historian, any theory it seems is despised in equal measure. As Phelan and Sumison continue, the sustained attempts to use reductionist approaches to generalizable knowledge that renders being a teacher more procedural than pedagogical are virtually universal. Phelan (2005) says the push to return teacher education simply into the realm of the practical has been overwhelming and Levine’s report in 2006 is a prime example of this. Levine, in a staggeringly instrumentalist view of teacher education, proclaimed that programmes of teacher education in the USA were failing to prepare teachers for the standards-based accountability-driven classroom where the only real measure of success (and, one assumes, therefore excellence) is student achievement. We are sure that if Levine were in close enough proximity, the various elected Minsters or Secretaries of Education around the world bent on ‘reform’ would be heartily slapping him on the back. All this serves to underline the idea that teacher education is for the most part under siege largely from particular public interest groups (it has to be said predominantly groups that sit on the right of the political spectrum) who find nothing of any merit in university-based teacher education and who seek to remove as many barriers to becoming a teacher as possible, and this includes bypassing university-based teacher education altogether (Mayer et al., 2008). One could be forgiven for assuming that this is a right-wing conspiracy. However, much of the teacher education reform in the United Kingdom has occurred recently and under a Labour administration. In Australia, similar education (and higher education) policies were initiated under the Australian Labor Party and in the USA Barack Obama’s administration has retained some of the most contentious and divisive education policies. This demonstrates perhaps that the neo-liberal imagina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I The study
• PART II Understanding the data through the dimensions
• PART III Implication for policy, practice and research
• Bibliography
• Index